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Abstract

Aerial drones are emerging in industrial and environmental monitoring as they are effective tools that are able to reach far and isolated areas. However, the regularity communication developments have not grown as fast as the technology needs. Either due to the lack of communication coverage or power inefficiency. As a result, some other solution should be proposed such as the internet of things. Internet of Things technology has a great potential of becoming a leading industry since it makes objects able to communicate with each other. IOT/M2M (Internet of Things/Machine-to-machine) communication could be used in a wide range of applications such as environmental surveillance and monitoring systems. These systems could be fixed ends or moving ends like an Unmanned Ariel vehicle (UAV). In this case, LoRa/LPWAN (Long Range Communication) / (Low Power Wide Area Network) is selected to be the best candidate, since it provides a wide coverage area and power efficient systems. This thesis develops and tests a communication scheme prototype for environmental UAV monitoring system using LoRa-LPWAN. Also, a functional testbed for testing the prototype is proposed as well. The prototype was tested in different environmental sites such as line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight environments. The developed scheme performs successfully in harsh environments and its readings were fully documented throughout this thesis.